Stronger Discipline Inspection Tours Make for Stricter Party Self-Governance*

January 12, 2016

Discipline inspection tours are a strategic institutional arrangement for scrutiny within our Party. In the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911), circuit inspectors carried a sword given by the emperor as a sign of their power during their inspection tours. Our discipline inspectors are not ancient circuit inspectors, but they must be authoritative. They are vital to the development of the country and the Party.

The key to stronger and more effective discipline inspection tours lies in full implementation of the policies of the Central Committee. Discipline inspection tours should focus on whether Party organizations are safeguarding the authority of the Party Constitution, enforcing strict Party self-governance, and following the Party's guidelines, principles, policies and decisions, and on whether a given Party leadership organization is weak, has failed to assume principal responsibilities, or whether it has done sufficient work in enforcing strict Party self-governance. Discipline inspection tours should urge Party organizations to shoulder their responsibilities for ensuring Party self-supervision and self-governance.

With Party discipline as the criterion, discipline inspection tours should check the enforcement of political discipline and look for any evidence of misconduct in clean governance, discipline, style of work, and selection and appointment of officials. They should exert their role properly in deterring misconduct and removing the root causes.

Taking the opportunity of implementing the "Provisions of the Communist Party of China on Discipline Inspection Tours", we should improve our discipline inspection capability in accordance with Party regulations and discipline, and promote institutionalized and standardized discipline inspection tours.

The nationwide coverage of discipline inspection tours serves as a form of deterrence. At the central level there are more than 280 organizations, with more than 100 still due for inspection – a heavy task. The next step is to realize full coverage at the central level by inspecting all the departments of the Central Committee and central government. We will make further institutional innovations, establishing sound work mechanisms for organization and leadership, coordination, report and feedback, rectification, and personnel development. We will reform the organizational system, tapping the potential from within the system and motivating the staff while bringing in new members to the team, so as to optimize the personnel structure. We will also employ new methods to make special discipline inspection tours more targeted, more flexible, and more effective.

Problems or evidence of misconduct discovered during discipline inspection tours should be classified by category, and we should make coordinated efforts to ensure that all are tackled. Commissions for discipline inspection and organizational departments should follow up promptly, identifying the nature of every problem and offering clear solutions to all. Problems discovered during a discipline inspection tour should be assigned to the relevant Party organization. Those involved must be held accountable for their own problems; there must be no standing by or trying to talk their way out of it. We should follow up and ensure rectification measures are implemented in the inspected organization, and we must call to account those who rectify problems in a perfunctory manner, are inefficient, or refuse to act.

Inspection teams should identify the root causes of the problems they discover, offer their suggestions, and urge inspected Party organizations to close institutional loopholes. In addition to historical and subjective causes, an objective cause for problems discovered during inspection tours is institutional issues. These can take the form of deficient standards, insufficient enforcement, and lack of supervisory measures in the management of personnel, affairs, and assets. We need to further reform the system of supervision to make it targeted and effective. Party committees of provinces and equivalent administrative units should strengthen leadership over inspection tours to ensure full coverage of inspection during their term of office. Secretaries of these Party committees, ministers of government ministries and commissions, and secretaries of Party leadership groups or committees of state organs should pinpoint accountable individuals and put forward rectification measures regarding key problems discovered during inspection tours, rather than assigning them at random or issuing vague statements.

* Part of the speech at the Sixth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

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